Fear the Dead (Book 4) (2 page)

“Don’t you think I get a say in
this?” said Lou. “As captain of the guard?”

Darla laughed. “Captain? Don’t make
me laugh. They all hate you.”

“Shut up Darla.”

I stood up.

“That’s enough. We’ve got our plan,
and I expect you all to see that it’s done.”

“This isn’t going to be popular,”
said Darla.

“People don’t have to like what I
do,” I said. “As long as they’re alive long enough to hate me.”

Chapter 2

A few hours later I stood in my tent
above a fold-up picnic table. I had stretched a map across the surface. The
sides of it curled over the edge of the plastic, but it didn’t matter, because
I wouldn’t reach that section of the map for a long time yet. I had drawn red
crosses through parts to mark where I had been. When I thought about the hours
I’d spent walking alone, I felt drained. I got a couple of hours of sleep a
night at best, and I woke up as soon as the sun peeked through the clouds each
morning.

I went looking for two things.
Stalker nests, and Justin. I didn’t know where my friend had gone after we had
gotten separated in the battle of Bleakholt, but I refused to think of him as
dead. He was alive out there, somewhere; I just needed to find him.

“You look like shit,” said a voice.

I turned and saw Lou. She was wearing
a thick parka coat with fur running across the collar and over the hood. I
remembered the days when she would walk around in a vest no matter the weather,
and I was glad she was finally seeing sense. It seemed that these days Lou was
putting less and less effort into showing people how tough she was. She still
spat venom if someone looked at her the wrong way, but she didn’t go all out
trying to cause trouble.

I rolled the map up, walked across
the tent and put it in my rucksack.

“Going somewhere?” said Lou.

“Just getting familiar with the local
geography.”

“You should get some sleep, Kyle.”

“I could say the same about you.”

Lou crossed her arms.

“You appointed me captain of the
watch, remember? It’s my job to stay up at night. I get my sleep during the
day.”

“Like a vampire?”

She nodded. “Like Dracula without the
penchant for virgins.”

“Can you close the tent?” I said.

Lou walked across the tent and pulled
the zipper, muting the sounds of the camp.  The air became stuffy again. I sat
on the floor and crossed my legs. Lou took a seat opposite me.

“Something wrong, Kyle?”

I knew what I wanted to say, but it
was like the words tried to work their way up my throat and something beat them
back down before they surfaced. I took a deep breath.

“I’m hardly sleeping,” I said.

“Well yeah. That’s what I told you.
You need a good few hours of shut-eye.”

“It’s not just that, Lou. With
running around trying to help everyone. The stalkers, the infected. I’m always
wired. Like I’m stood on a building top and the wind’s blowing on my back and
any minute it’s going to push me over the side. Something’s happening, Lou.”

“You’re worn-out and you’ve got a lot
of crap to deal with. Any shrink would tell you it’s normal and then charge you
forty quid for the privilege.”

I sank back against the side of the
tent and felt the fabric become taut against my weight.

“I get heart palpitations, sometimes.
And it feels like my breath is stuck in my chest and I have to really work to
get it out. Sometimes I try and sleep, but before I know it hours have gone and
my eyes haven’t closed.”

“Sounds like a grade-A case of anxiety.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I picked up a few books on a supply
run. You might think it’s kinda stupid, but I’m trying to change my outlook on
life. Maybe they’d help you.”

“It’ll take more than a book to sort
my head out.”

“Maybe you should take a step down,”
said Lou. “As much as I think she’s a massive bitch, Darla could take the
weight off you a little.”

I sat forward.

“You serious? I can’t give her the
reigns.”

“Then why have her bossy arse in our
meetings?”

“Because I have to. She has too much
support.”

Lou folded her arms. Strands of her
roughly-cut hair broke away from the grease and dropped over her forehead.

“Why is being leader such a big deal?”

“Well have a look around you. See
anyone else? The people out there are softer than butter. They were sheltered
in Bleakholt, and they don’t have a clue what it’s like to really have to
survive. If we left them to fend for themselves, they’d die. I can’t have that
on my conscience.”

***

I glanced at my watch, but I knew
what time it would say. Eight forty-five. That couldn't have been more wrong,
because judging by the deep darkness in the sky it was definitely past
midnight. I'd always looked for watch batteries whenever I came close to a town
or village, but I had never found any. I wouldn’t take it off though. The face
was scratched and the strap scuffed but this had been a birthday gift from my
parents, and it was the last thing of theirs that I had.

I stepped out of my tent and into the
air. Cold wind slapped my face. I stood for a minute or two as it teased across
my skin, and I drank in the utter silence of the camp. All the fires were
extinguished, all the tent doors shut. The only people awake would be me, and
whoever Lou had put on watch for the evening.

It took me thirty minutes, but I made
a lap around camp. This was something that I had done every night lately. It
started a few weeks earlier when I took a midnight walk to clear my head, and
soon it became a ritual. I started to think that unless I did a lap of the camp
at night, something bad would happen. It was as though my footsteps were the
only protection against unseen eyes that waited in the shadows.

I felt the responsibility as sure as
a physical weight. It felt like I had a ton of bricks on my back, and every
passing day someone added a new one to the load. My spine was starting to
crack, my face beginning to strain, and I didn’t know how much more of it I
could take.

As I walked across the field and felt
my boots squelch into the mud, I thought about Darla. I could hand over power
to her in an instant, and the people would respect her. But Darla was like the
rest of them. She’d never lived in the Wilds, and she’d rarely ever seen true
danger. I was the only one who could lead them, but my power was slipping.
Darla was chipping away at it piece by piece, and it wouldn’t be long until she
broke through. The question was, could I hold it together for long enough?

 I needed to resolve the problem of
the dead bodies. We had to know what was doing it, and why. The people needed
answers and they were becoming restless. If this carried on, I didn’t think I
was going to be able to control them for much longer.

I saw a shape in the field in front
of me. It was long and dark and it seemed to blend into the grass. As I walked
over to it the shape became clearer, and I felt my chest start to tighten and
my breath struggle in my throat. Soon I stood over it and saw it for what it
was.

In the field, laying on the mud and
grass, was the body of a teenager. Something had torn apart his chest and cut
open his stomach.

Chapter 3

Rain battered down on the canvas of
the tent. The rain was frequent in Scotland, and at night I would lay on my
sleeping bag and listen to the drops on the fabric. It used to sound like
little fingers tapping on it, asking me to let them in.

After I’d recovered from the shock of
discovering the body, I had found Lou and Darla. Lou dismissed the man that she
had put on watch, and Darla and I carried the body carefully around the
outskirts of camp. The last thing we needed was panic spreading, and luckily
nobody saw us.

We were in a spare tent on the west
side of the camp. We placed the body on a net-less old ping pong table that
we’d found in the boot of a van nearby. The vehicle hadn’t started but the
table was easy to assemble, so it wasn’t a complete loss.

“Whatever it was, it made a mess of
him,” said Darla.

She had her sleeves rolled up to her
elbows, and patterns of blood were splattered on her arms. She didn’t seem to
care that crimson patches covered her clothes. The fact that most people had
only one or two outfits meant that a lot of folks were beyond caring about
appearances. Gregor Horlock religiously washed his clothes in the stream each
day and stayed in his underwear while they dried, but he was the exception
rather than the rule.

“He looks like a slab of beef,” said
Lou.

“You’re as sensitive as ever,” I
said.

I looked at the body. It was a
teenage boy. His eyes were closed, his skin white and cold to the touch. His
face and legs were as they should be, but his chest looked like it had burst,
and his torso was cut open from hip to hip. I was no doctor, but even I could
see that there were things missing from him. It didn’t seem as though all his
organs were there. That wasn’t the worst of it. Finding the body had been bad enough,
but when I saw his face I felt dread well up inside me.

“Where’s Reggie?” I said.

“Probably asleep,” said Lou.

Darla walked around the body and
stood by his head. She stroked her fingers through the teenager’s blonde hair.

“We should get him,” she said.

“For god’s sake keep Reggie away. For
now, at least.”

“You can’t hide this from him,” said
Darla.

“I’m not hiding anything from anyone.”

“You’re trying to blind people to the
dangers of staying here. That’s the same as hiding.”

I tried to bite back on the anger
that was growing in me. Something about Darla got deep inside and tweaked my
nerves. It wasn’t just that she stood against me on some things, because I
could deal with that. It was something about her as a person. That was my
dilemma.

“How is this helping? Can’t you do
something constructive?”

Darla gave a knowing smile. “Oh I am
helping,” she said.

“We need to clean the boy up,” said
Lou. “Then we need to go get Reggie and tell him what’s happened to his son. He
and Kendal need to grieve.”

For a second all I could think about
was how much more pressure this would put on me. Darla wouldn’t hesitate to use
this as a way of turning people against me. Person by person she was whittling
away my leadership, and soon I were going to find myself out of supporters.

As quickly as the thought came, I
shook it away. I looked again at the boy on the table, his arms flopping over
the edges, blood smeared down his waist and on the green plastic beneath him.
His flesh looked pearl white. His eyelids made him seem like he was sleeping.
If it weren’t for the hole where his stomach and chest had been, I would have
expected his eyelids to flicker as he dreamed.

“I’m done toeing your line Kyle,”
said Darla. “I’m going to start getting support to leave this place. Don’t
think that I’ll be subtle about it, either. Mum always said I was as subtle as
a brick to the face.”

The anger was becoming harder and
harder to choke back, like bile trying to climb up my throat. I knew I couldn’t
get angry. That was what she wanted, and it would show that she could play me
like Gregor’s guitar.

“What we need,” I said, “is to find
the stalker nest.”

Darla threw her hands in the air.

“I give up.”

She left the tent. Even though she
was gone, her aura hung in the air as if it was a perfume too strong for the
breeze to break up. My chest felt tight, my legs restless. I needed to sleep,
but all the same knew I wouldn’t be able to.

“How are you so sure it’s stalkers?”
said Lou.

I looked at the body again.

“We need to have Charlie take a look
at him. He’ll be able to tell us more. In the meantime, we need to get a group
together to go on a hunt. We’ll find the stalker nests and tear them apart
while they sleep.”

Lou leaned with her hands on the
table inches away from the boy.

“You’ll struggle for volunteers,
Kyle. You’ve got a camp full of people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Everyone’s
got the shakes. Anxiety. Depression. Most people are too scared to get out of
bed.”

I heard a commotion at the front of
the tent. Someone on the outside was trying to pull the zipper down so they
could get in, but it seemed like their hands were too shaky. They stopped
trying to pull the zipper and banged on the tent.

“Open the damn door,” they said.

I knew the voice, and I knew we
couldn’t stop him from coming into the tent. I just wished there was some way
we could clean up the boy before we let Reggie see him. I couldn’t even imagine
what it would feel like to look at your teenage son with his body so mutilated.

As Reggie entered the tent I looked
at his face and saw how creased it was. The wrinkles on his forehead foilded
with despair, and his eyes screwed up as though his grief was closing them.
Then I looked closer and saw that one of his eyes was swollen and the skin
around it was blue. He stood over the table and stared at his son’s body, his
clothes covered in mud and blood, chest peeled back and insides showing. When
Reggie’s eyes welled up, I had to look away.

***

I left the tent and walked across the
camp. Some people had heard the commotion and stood at the entrance of their
tents and peered out into the darkness to see what was going on. One man called
out to me as I walked by him. He wore nothing but a pair of tight boxers.

“Kyle,” he said, in an accent so
thick it flowed through my ears like treacle.

“Go to sleep Gregor,” I said.

“They’re saying there’s been another
body.”

“Just go back to sleep.”

“Think I could take a look at it?”

I ignored Gregor and carried on
walking across the camp until I reached the tent I was looking for. A glow came
from it, as I knew that it would. While some people had the luxury of sleep
when the sun had fallen, I knew that one person preferred to carry out her job
in the dead of night.

I tapped twice on the tent and then
unzipped it. I walked inside and saw a wooden bench. A plastic sheet covered
the surface, on which was the body of a pig. A girl stood above it wearing a
white shirt that was so dotted with blood that she looked like an artist who
had been gone wild with a tin of paint.

“Hey Kyle,” she said, and lifted her
right hand to her hand. She held a cleaver in her palm, and she ran the back of
her hand across her forehead and wiped a smear of pig blood on her skin.

“Evening Mel,” I said.  “Haven’t seen
you much lately.”

“I’ve been busy,” she said, and
nodded down at the table.

She had cut portions off the pig, but
it looked like she still had a way to go. Mel was important to the camp. Her task
was to butcher the hunter's kills and make sure they stretched enough to feed
everyone. It was the last job I would have ever expected a person like her to
take, because she’d always been so quiet. When Gregor Horlock told me that he
was looking for an apprentice, I was shocked when Mel stepped forward.

Mel raised the cleaver and brought it
down sharply. There was a squelching sound as it cut through flesh, and I
smelled blood in the air.

“What can I do for you, Kyle?” she
said. Sweat mixed with the blood on her forehead.

“There’s been another body,” I said.

Mel looked at me, nodded, and then
looked back at the pig.

“You don’t seem too bothered,” I
said.

“It’s been a long time since I was squeamish.
Death’s a part of life.”

I took a step closer.

“I’m organising a hunting party.
We’re going to look for stalker nests and put an end to this. I was wondering
if you could join me.”

“I’m a little busy,” she said.

“We might find Justin out there. You
never know.”

Mel dropped the cleaver to the table
where it clanged. Her face started to turn red.

“Fuck Justin.”

She took shallow breaths as though
she was trying to hold back her anger. She picked up the cleaver, raised it in
the air and brought it down harder than before on the pig. Blood splattered
back on her shirt.

Mel used to be so nervous. She
wouldn’t get pushed around, but she was nervous all the same. She had been perfect
for Justin. When the two of them got together I had been sceptical, but it was
easy to see that she was good for him. I wondered how Justin being missing was
affecting her, and whether her manner was just a front.

“Listen Kyle,” she said. “Justin is
dead. You know it, I know it. He went without even a thought for me.”

“He sacrificed himself to save – “

“He’s a selfish bastard.”

I stepped forward until I was inches
away from the table. The smell of blood was pungent enough to pinch at my
nostrils. When cooked the pig meat would make me salivate, but when it was cold
and dead it was disgusting.

“He’s not dead, Mel. When he walked
toward the infected, they didn’t attack him. They let him pass. Whatever
Whittaker injected him with, it made the infected see him as one of their own.”

A year earlier, a scientist named
Whittaker had kidnapped Justin. Whittaker believed he had found a vaccine for
the infection. He injected Justin with it, and ever since then Justin had
started to change. He became sadder, more withdrawn. He told me once that he
felt alienated from people.

Later, when we were fighting against
a wave of infected outside Bleakholt, Justin had sacrificed himself. He
detonated a bomb that trapped the infected and stopped most of them reaching
us. It was Justin’s actions that had swung the battle our way, and it was the
only reason that we were all alive today.

“Look,” I said. “I know he’s alive.
And he’s my friend, so I can’t abandon him. I want to find him, but at the same
time I can’t just get up and go. It’s the life of one person, versus the lives
of fifty.”

Mel lifted the cleaver over her head
and threw it across the tent.

“Didn’t you hear me? Fuck Justin. I
don’t care if he’s alive or not.  Can you guess what I did last night Kyle?”

“What?”

She leaned forward with both hands on
the table. Her face was scrunched up, her forehead covered in sweat and blood.

“Last night, after I finished here, I
went to Peter Jenkin’s tent and let him screw my brains out. Two nights
earlier, I went to Kieron’s and did the same. I don’t care about Justin.”